Jeremy Rockliff,Minister for Health
Nurses, midwives, and patients are set to benefit from the introduction of a new Bedside Medication Management approach across our major Tasmanian public hospitals.
The new approach will involve ward-based pharmacy technicians operating on wards across the State and focusing on four objectives:
- Improved timeliness of medication treatments;
- Improved patient safety;
- Reduced medication waste; and
- Decreasing non-nursing and midwifery tasks, providing the professions with more time for direct patient care.
Under the current processes for medication management on hospital wards, nursing and midwifery staff are responsible for ordering, transporting, and counting medications.
Going forward, the adoption of the Bedside Medication Management approach will see each ward allocated a pharmacy technician who will take on these medication management responsibilities. This will reduce the need for nurses and midwives to undertake administrative tasks associated with medications and allow our highly qualified nurses and midwives to spend more time with patients, and less time looking for medications.
Collectively, across the state, this will free up hundreds of hours each week for our health care workers to do what they do best – care for patients and their families.
The Tasmanian Liberal Government is providing funding to deliver additional pharmacy technicians, medication trolleys, IT equipment, as well as subsidised training for pharmacy technician trainees.
The new system will begin rolling out from April 2022 with implementation across major public hospital wards to be finalised within six months.
